New York Vermont and New Hampshire

October 9, 2023

We arrived at Watkins Glen State Park located at the southern end of Seneca Lake in the New York Finger Lakes Region on September 18. The state park is best known for the Watkins Glen Gorge Trail. It is a fabulous trail 1.5 miles long, narrow and etched out by water over millions of years. The water goes over slides, slots and eddies and includes 19 waterfalls. It also has 832 steps! - with a return trip is via a rim trail which gives several nice views down into the gorge. We also visited several other waterfalls in the area. 

Shequaga Falls

Eagle Cliff Falls

The area is also famous for its wine growing and we took the opportunity to visit 3 different wineries in the area for tastings. Not being very big wine experts, we choose the wineries that we visited by their views over the lake and it was a lot of fun.

One afternoon we took an hour-long sightseeing cruise on Seneca Lake. Besides being a very beautiful lake, we learned a lot about the history of the area and the main industry being salt mining.

We also spent an hour at the Watkins Glen International Raceway watching cars participating in a driving school race by very fast.

On September 21, we moved eastward to the Hudson River Valley and spent 3 nights at Clarence Fahnestock State Park on the east side of the Hudson River.  On Friday, we went to Storm King Art Center. This is an over 500 acre outdoor art space filled with over 100 sculptures and some of the sculptures are so large you can tell why they need so much acreage. We spent over five hours there and took 2 tram tours and walked a lot also. It was very impressive.

On the return to our campsite we spent about an hour at Stonecrop Gardens. It was a very lovely garden. The formal flower gardens were especially beautiful with so many different colored flowers in bloom. It started to rain this evening.

We visited Manitoga on Saturday. Manitoga was the home and estate of designer Russell Wright and his wife Mary. They bought the property in 1942, but the house and studio were not built until about 1952. The property was formerly a quarry but they rejuvenated the land with beautiful trails and woodland gardens. We toured the house and and studio which were designed to fit into the landscape and were very beautiful. It rained most of the day.

Sunday, we moved north up the Hudson Valley to Kenneth L. Wilson State Park in the Catskill Mts. It rained most of the time we were there, but we managed to squeeze in a nice walk to the day use area in between rain showers.

The next day we left the park and continued north. We passed through Albany and saw the state capitol from the highway. We went along the Champlain Canal for quite awhile and even saw some locks. This system connects Lake Champlain with the Hudson River and the Erie Canal. We crossed into Vermont and got to our campsite at Button Bay State Park on Lake Champlain. We had a very nice campsite that overlooked the lake.

Tuesday, we went into Burlington, Vermont with a population of 40,000 people and quite a lot of traffic congestion. We drove around town and walked along the very Lake Champlain  waterfront path.

The Shelburne Museum was our destination for Wednesday, and it was very nice. It is a living history/folk art museum on 45 acres with 39 buildings,  25 of which are historic and were moved to the museum from other locations. Some of the buildings have collections of folk art in them such as weather vanes, carriages, guns, duck decoys, hunting trophies, miniature circus parades and much more. Other buildings had a blacksmith shop, print shop and textile shop, general store and apothecary shop.There were also building full of American art. My favorite buildings were the Shaker round barn, a covered bridge and the 220 ft side-wheel Steamboat which was moved on wheels from Lake Champlain a few miles away.

Our final day in Vermont, we hiked around the state park, Mark kayaked on Lake Champlain and we visited the nearby Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.

The next day we moved eastward toward New Hampshire. We stopped to see a covered bridge in Waitsfield Vermont and at the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory in Waterbury, Vermont. We crossed into New Hampshire  and continued to our campground at Crawforde Notch State Park in the White Mountains using it for our base This was a very nice campground with large spots, lots of trees and a stream running behind the campsite. 

We took the nearby Mt. Washington Cog Railroad to the top of Mt Washington at 6,288 feet.. Smoky skies limited viewing to the Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont area but the ride up was worth doing for all the beautiful fall colors.  It was quite chilly and windy at the top. Mt Washington is known for having the worst weather in the world and we went to the “Worst Weather” museum in the visitor center.

Another day we drove along the scenic Kancamagus Highway and enjoyed the brilliant fall colors on the trees, several waterfalls and a covered bridge.

We also visited the Flume Gorge at Franconia Notch State Park. A wooden pathway and stairs takes one through the notch with tumbling waters and lovely water falls. Of course we could not resist another train ride and took the Conway Scenic Railroad on a one hour excursion.

That brings us to Acadia National Park in Maine where we will start our next installment.